adGridWork is a re-imaging of the old (Web 1.0-1.5) ad exchange sites. I can’t remember any specific sites, but the basic premise was for every 3 (or whatever) ads you show on your site, your add gets shown on 2 sites. The extra ad was sold, allowing the site to make money. The big difference with the adGridWork project is that everything is free. It is a basically a way for the web community to help support each others sites with nothing being taken away.

The site was created by Kyle Johnson and Nick Mazza, both college students majoring in Computer Science. Kyle and Nick are true practitioners of rapid development - they conceived the site in November and had it launched on December 1st. It’s been less than two months since the launch, but they have over 800 registered sites thus far.

One of the most impressive features on the service is it’s ability to filter ads so that only relevant ones are shown. This benefits the site displaying the ads as well as having your ad shown on appropriate sites in the network.

When registering a site with our network, you can select from dozens of specific categories your site falls under, as well as specify any number of keywords to associate with your site. Our ad engine will then display your ad on other sites with similar categories/keywords. In turn, similar ads are displayed on your site, with the exception of any competitor’s ads (you can list your competitors when registering a site).

I signed up for the service a couple weeks ago so I could give it a trial run before writing this. adGridWork provides stats for both the ads your site has served up as well as your ad on other sites. The stats for PseudoCoder are a bit disappointing, but that isn’t adGridWorks fault. This blog isn’t highly visited (yet) - I’ve only shown 178 ads on this site and 0 (as in zero, none) have been clicked. Stats are updated in real time - I just clicked an ad to check.

Right now I’m clearly a leacher. Although I’ve only shown 178 ads, my ad has been shown 5991 times. And clicked on 5 times for a .08% conversion rate. To be honest I have no idea if that rate is good or bad, but I suspect it’s bad, horribly bad. Although this could mean my ad isn’t being show on the right types of sites, I’m guessing it probably because the ad itself isn’t very compelling.

Even though the service isn’t working on great for me at this point I’m going to leave it on this site for a bit. It’s the least I could do since I’ve my ad has appeared about 30 times more than I’ve shown other peoples. If anyone has any suggestions for improving the text in my ad I would definitely give it a shot.

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